The Penn State IceCube group is partnering in new large GPU-centric cluster, the Cyber-Laboratory for Astronomy, Materials and Physics (CyberLAMP), funded by the NSF MRI program. D. Cowen is a co-PI for CyberLAMP, a $1M-scale compute cluster emphasizing the use of GPUs for scientific applications.

For certain calculations, graphical processing units can provide orders of magnitude more compute power than standard CPUs. The IceCube Collaboration is already taking advantage of GPU power for certain simulations. Working with colleagues in Canada, the Penn State group aims to dramatically expand this effort, with the ultimate goal of quickly running hundreds or thousands of simulations for each neutrino interaction. We will then use the subset of those simulations whose pattern most closely matches the pattern produced by the actual neutrino to reconstruct its properties–namely, its energy, direction and flavor.

An individual neutrino interaction will produce upwards of millions of photons in the ice at the South Pole. Simulating an individual event involves mimicking the propagation of these photons through the optically complex ice at the South Pole. This process is very time-consuming on traditional CPUs, but much, much speedier with the GPU architecture, an architecture originally developed to trace photons to make video games more realistic.

Some proposal details:

Title: MRI: Acquisition of High Performance Hybrid Computing Cluster to Advance Cyber-enabled Science and Education at Penn State